Thought this was cool, and possibly a reason to dive into the Rock Band hype. Someone developed a way to use your Rock Band Drum Kit as a Real Drum Kit on your PC, allowing you to set up with any .wav configuration you desire. More found here – http://andrewrudson.com/main.php

I was bored at work today, so I started coming up with retarded taglines and strange images for bwoak.com. I don’t know why but this is where my mind went today. Here goes. These are what I thought of so far….

“If it ain’t Bwoak, F*** it!” – (If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it)

“We put the Woa in a BK Sandwich”

“Bwoak. Now with less Balex.”

IMAGE: Just a frog, probably with a goatee, wearing a “super” t-shirt, going “Bwoak”.

So Texas Instruments has come up with a technology that allows for one TV to show individual gamers each a different screen via special glasses (along with the special TV). This is a technology they call “DLP DualView.” At the right price, this would be a great idea. At the moment, it’s stupid – here’s why.

The TV: This piece was quoted at CES as costing $1899. Bare in mind this is a DLP TV for later. Apparently there are two ways to use the TV. The first is that it can create 3D video by displaying dual images and the glasses would sort it out (which you can do with regular sets anyway) and the other is that it will filter out one of the video feeds so you can only see one (again via the glasses). The idea is that people look on your screen and use info that they would not realistically have access to to aid them. Some people call this cheating, I think it also can be classified as what’s called “meta-gaming.” No now instead of being able to do that, you’d get a jumble on the screen, something like what is pictured below. Is this really that useful?

The Glasses: $199 – with the hope that it will come down to $99 at some point. So right of the bat, for this to make any sense at all, you need two pairs of these, $498. So we’re roughly at $2400 dollars. Now wear the glasses, you feel like an idiot.

Oh yeah, you’ll have to have two game consoles. Let’s play the devil’s advocate and say that your friend is going to lug his over for this event, despite the simple labor of this being annoying. Now Player 3 shows up, “Hey guys can I play?” Nope! So this technology is useful if you only hang out with one person at a time who has the same game console and game as you…and feels like bringing it over. Or…here’s an alternative to what you can do with that same $2400 dollars…

You can buy 2 flat panel plasma TVs. Let’s go with the Panasonic TH-42PX75U, which I just found on Amazon for $1099. Two of them, $2200. DLP technology was great when it was the affordable alternative to big-screen flat panels. The price of plasmas and LCDs has dropped significantly in the last few years, many DLP manufacturers have fled the DLP (or any other projection) TV market all together. I selected plasma for the sake of this example since I feel it is simply the best picture there is. Moving right along, now you have two displays and you can feel like a king. Now you have $200 dollars left still. You and your one friend can have a nice meal together at a fancy restaurant for like $100. Maybe you can buy a new game on the way home…and then because this advice was so helpful donate the remaining $50 to us! 🙂

So, it’s happening again. I should have made the move sooner, but got lazy and didn’t want to do it. My reseller account rehosting company – vizaweb – is down for the count again. It’s been 2 days. Last time they blacked out like this, they gave me a heavy discount to stay with them, so I stayed thinking that things would be better. For a majority of the year they were (with minor hiccups here or there). I stayed mostly because of my job and income situation. I would have had to pay more and spend even more time moving everything and getting situated and it just wasn’t worth it. A year later, I know a lot more involving web stuff, have a better job, and am better off financially. And now I might be screwed.

What stinks even more is that my “yearly subscription” with them is set to run out today and re-new. I tried to change my CC info so it wouldn’t auto-renew, but… their site has been down for 2 days.

So here is to hoping they at least come back up so I can start re-backing everything and making the manual move. I have never done the process before and I’m sure it sucks hardcore. I wish I was on an M2J level of being consistant on backing things up and fluent in restoring them. I know he’s guru-like when it comes to PC’s at least. I’m sure I have almost all the files I need to make the moves now (except for up-to-date databases). It might even be great for me if they never come back seeing it could give me credibility to start some things from scratch and light a fire under me. Yet. I don’t want that fire lit. I’d rather get my files back.

Launching at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, Fujitsu is finally bringing to the US market a laptop with a casing made out of corn. In case you’re wondering, this biopolymer is based on the same PLA components that are becoming more common for biodegradable plastic beverage cups. The main component is polylactic acid, also known as PLA, a resin that comes from the fermentation of the raw biomass from plants. PLA by itself is biodegradable, does not generate dioxin when burnt, or other harmful gases. Unfortunately the material still needs a small amount of fossil fuel for it to be able to be used as a laptop housing.